Dravidacris Bhaskar et Kasalo, 2022

Bhaskar, Dhaneesh, Sankararaman, H. & Kasalo, Niko, 2022, Dravidacris annamalaica gen. et sp. nov. a new pygmy unicorn grasshopper (Orthoptera: Tetrigidae) from South India, Zootaxa 5196 (3), pp. 420-432 : 422

Genus Dravidacris Bhaskar et Kasalo gen. nov.

Etymology

The genus Dravidacris is named in honour of the “ Dravidians ” (linguistic group), a term collectively representing the people who live in the southern states of India. The ending –acris is derived from the Greek word ἀκρίς, meaning “grasshopper, locust”, and is of feminine gender.

Diagnosis and comparative notes.

Dravidacris annamalaica gen. et sp. nov.

(Dravidian pygmy hopper)can be distinguished from other Metrodorinae by the following set of characteristics: (i) elongated dorsally flat sword-like fastigium, forward and slightly upward raising flat rostrum, (ii) finely granulose integument, (iii) short medial carina of the vertex, present only in the anterior part of the elongated fastigium, (iv) anterior margin of the pronotum distinctly dentate, (v) fore femora distinctly widened in their middle part, (vi) dorsal distal margins of the fore femora with two distinct tubercles.

Dravidacris gen. et sp. nov. stands out from most of the genera of the subfamily Metrodorinae with its unique sword-like head. Within the polyphyletic tribe Cleostratini , it superficially resembles Pseudomitraria from Africa, Rostella Hancock, 1913 from SE Asia, and Indomiriatra from India. The similarity is the result of convergent evolution as there are apparent differences in how the horn develops in those genera. In Pseudomitraria , the horn developed as an extension below the scutellum and above the bifurcation of the frontal costa. In Indomiriatra and Rostella , the horn develops as an extension above the bifurcation of the frontal costa together with raised frontal costa and the medial carina of the fastigium. In Dravidacris gen. et sp. nov., the horn develops as an extension above the bifurcation of the frontal costa together with raised frontal costa.

A brief morphological comparison is listed in Table 1 . It compares the new species with the horned genera and Bolivaritettix sculptus ( Bolívar, 1887) , the type species of the genus Bolivaritettix Günther, 1939 , hypothesized by Günther (1959) to be related to the African-Indian clade that he believed to include some of the horned genera. The genus Bolivaritettix consists of a large number of species. There has never been a systematic review of it, only reviews for individual countries that regularly describe even more species. As the diagnosis of the genus does not mention many of the characters that we use for comparison and as the identity of the genus is not clear, we compare the horned genera only to the type species ( Zha et al. 2015, Storozhenko 2018, Deng et al. 2018). Although there is active research going on in the region, India’s fauna of Tetrigidae is still not taxonomically well-understood ( Gupta & Chandra 2017, Bhaskar et al. 2020). We do not provide a detailed examination of all the species present in India because much more research is needed to establish order in the taxa.